SAP Design Studio 1.3 on HANA Platform

SAP Design Studio 1.3 is packed with lot of new features and improvements and the most important feature out of them is its ability to run in HANA platform. With this new feature, it can consume data, publish applications and execute applications on top of SAP’s revolutionary In-Memory technology. The combination of both SAP Design Studio and SAP HANA has pioneered a new vision in Visualization tools. Using HANA as a platform, Design Studio completely utilizes the computing power and speed of the HANA platform.

Installation: Installing Design Studio addon in HANA platform is simple, faster and easier. The installer is provided as a “Delivery Unit” and it can be directly imported to HANA server. Please refer to this link for a detailed step-to-step guide on Design studio – HANA server installation .

Native HANA Services: While using HANA as a platform, Design Studio makes use of HANA components and HANA’s native languages. Design Studio applications are stored in HANA repository and it uses XSJS (Server side JAVA Script) to handle server requests. Whenever a request is made by Design Studio to HANA server, it is processed by a XSJS service.

For example: Following is an error message shown by Design Studio when it communicates with XSJS service.

Using the Repository: Design Studio applications are saved in the HANA repository. However all the applications are saved to a common package named “designstudio”. So the applications published by all users will be available in the same repository package. As the applications are maintained in packages, this makes “Promotion”/”Transport” of Design Studio applications easier than ever. HANA specific promotion concept of “Delivery Units” can be used to promote apps from one environment to another.

Custom Addons: The most important reason for an enterprise to use Design Studio for Analysis is its ability to interoperate with custom addons built by developers. Design Studio on HANA platform has the option to host custom addons as Design Studio on BOBJ does. However the installation of custom addons in HANA platform is easier than the BOBJ platform. Unlike Business Objects, there is no need for complex steps like restarting APS servers hosting “Analysis Application Service”. Installing the component to platform is enough for the applications to make use of the addon.

The custom components installed in HANA platform is also saved in the repository. The custom components are maintained in a separated package named as “designstudio_extensions”.

Roles and Authorizations: Design studio on HANA Platform makes use of Roles and Authorizations setup in the HANA system. Whenever user executes an application, he can see only the data what he is authorized to see. There is role named as “sap.bc.ina.service.v2.userRole::INA_USER” , which should be granted to users who need to execute Design Studio applications on HANA platform. If this role is not granted to the user, then he cannot see any data in his application though he has authorization to see that data.

Performance Design Studio on HANA platform performs better than Design Studio on BOBJ/NW. Since Design Studio applications are hosted in HANA repository and executed in XS Engine, the performance and rendering is faster.

We tried a small benchmarking on response time between Design Studio on HANA and Design Studio on BOBJ using SAP’s HANA EPM Demo data. The results prove that Design Studio on HANA provides better performance than Business Objects, where the data is retrieved from same server and rendered to same client tool.

Benchmarking data set consisted of 23M records

These are our initial observations on SAP Design Studio 1.3 using HANA as Platform. Please keep following us for more information on SAP Design Studio.